The present invention relates to product displays and advertising, and more particularly to a method of displaying products in an interactive setting such as at web site on a worldwide computer network.
Changeable product displays are known, for example, where a consumer can change, for example, the color of a product to see what the product would look like in different colors.
A method for accomplishing this change requires either that the product be photographed in each of the different colors, or that a coloring program be employed to apply color to a photograph of the product.
A difficulty arises, however, when a product configuration changes when a user wishes to select different features, and there is a desire to depict the different features. This would require photographs to be taken of all of the different possible combinations and permutations of products and features, which could quickly overwhelm a capacity for displaying the different combinations. For example, where a product has two different elements which can be changed, and each element has ten possible appearances, there will be one hundred different possible combinations that a user might wish to view.
Where such products are to be displayed on a computer based system, the memory requirements for graphics can quickly become overwhelmed in such a situation, for example in the example just described, one hundred separate graphic images would be required to be stored to accommodate all of the variations.
The present invention provides a method for displaying permutations where all of the different permiutations are not required to be shown in combinations. Instead, the present invention provides a method of being able to display all of the different combinations by piecing together displays of the individual permutations to provide a composite picture of a desired product.
Therefore, if a product has two changeable features, with each feature having ten possible appearances, only twenty photographs would be required, the ten of each feature, and a composite would be made of the permutation of each feature selected by the user, dramatically reducing the number of individual images required and, in a computer based system, dramatically reducing the memory requirements necessary for storing images of the products.
The provided method, thus, would allow the viewer to select a first feature, and a particular permutation of the first feature, to select a second feature and a particular permutation of the second feature, and so on through all of the possible features.
A composite image would then be generated and displayed from each of the individual feature permutations.